


results, not causes

by cheloniidae



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 12:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4834772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diane McClintock doesn't need a pretty face to stand by their sides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	results, not causes

A woman is lying dead in the street, and Diane McClintock isn’t angry anymore. The anger that carried her feet away from Fort Frolic, that spurred her on through Rapture’s glass-and-aluminum halls, that gave her the courage to bribe the guard at the gate— that anger's gone.

Diane’s rich clothing makes her stick out like a sore thumb amidst the muted tones of Apollo Square. People’s gazes burn into her, curious and fearful and angry, but no one so much as glances at the woman’s corpse. People walk past the body like it’s just another piece of trash littering the Square, no more unusual a newspaper or a Pep Bar wrapper.

Like living here is just a death that hasn’t happened yet.

When Diane blinks, she sees a burning woman on the backs of her eyelids. Just at the top of the fence, just feet away from freedom— and one of Ryan’s men lit her on fire with a snap of his fingers. Her screaming stopped when she hit the ground, but the burning didn’t. No one paid any attention to her, either. They just… let her lie there. Lie there and burn, and Diane can still smell the smoke she tried so hard not to breathe in.

She wants to hate them all. Everywhere, everywhere, she sees the same words spray-painted in red: **Atlas lives**. It’s what they shouted over gunfire when they set off the bomb; it’s what rang in Diane’s ears as she cried and bled and asked God why her, why her, why her. They ruined her that night. Ryan can’t even look at her now, can’t look at scars that will never, never fade. This is their fault. They’re thieves and bandits and terrorists and parasites and—

And a woman is lying dead in the street, and the smell of desperation hangs in the air, and Diane can’t make herself believe this is right.

* * *

She finds a man putting up posters near those awful, awful gallows. Three bodies, just starting to rot, dangle limply in the air. A banner condemns them as traitors, and Diane can taste bile in the back of her throat. When Ryan convinced her to leave the sun behind, he promised their new home would be a place where government never sent people to their deaths. But there’s a war in Rapture—  war, soldiers, and gallows.

_His_ soldiers. _His_ gallows.

The posters are the same kind she saw on her last walk through Arcadia. A strong-jawed man in suspenders, hands on his hips, looking into the distance with his head raised in unbroken defiance. And a question written across the bottom that she doesn’t know the answer to: _Who is Atlas?_

They hid the bomb inside a statue of the world-bearing titan; a piece of the globe he carried sliced right through her cheek. The name makes her throat tighten, knots her stomach with well-remembered fear. But Atlas, whoever he is, is important to these people. They put up posters knowing they could be hanged for it, and she wants to know why.

She _has_ to know why.

People tell her, in bits and pieces. Atlas is their leader, though most of them have never seen him. He’s what keeps them going as Ryan’s heel grinds down on them. He’s their hope. He gives the starving a crust of bread and a dream to fight for; when Ryan takes people’s husbands and wives and sons and daughters, Atlas gives them a reason to keep living.

“If you know who he is,” she asks one man, "why ask?”

“Atlas held up the world on his shoulders while the gods were hobnobbing up on some damn mountain,” he says. “That’s what working folks do for them rich bastards locked up in Olympus Heights. We’re all Atlas.”

Near Hestia Chambers, the scent of soup mingles with the scent of brine. Diane watches from a distance as an old woman ladles broth into bowls and sharp-edged cups. Charity chips away at very foundations of Rapture; she’s heard enough lectures to know that— but knowing and believing are different.

She isn’t sure what she believes, anymore.

A boy stands near the front of the line, shivering in the cold air. Ryan’s men take the girls — Diane doesn’t want it to be true, but it is, and suddenly the ground under her isn’t so steady — but the boys are useless to them. The fate they’re left to is hardly kinder. This boy’s clothes are barely more than rags; his bones show through his skin, sickly and sallow. Diane can’t bear to look at him for more than a moment.

The old woman sings as she gives him food, low and soulful and somehow, despite everything, with a spirit that isn’t crushed: “Atlas got a secret; you ain’t in this alone…”

God has abandoned the people of Apollo Square, but a titan hasn’t.

* * *

A list of what the constables find missing from Diane McClintock’s apartment: her warmest clothing, the most expensive of her jewelry, every scrap of food in the kitchen, every last dollar, and her.

A list of what they never knew was there to miss: a rosary, a single page from the book of Psalms, and a picture of two uniformed men smiling shoulder to shoulder with a not-yet-scarred woman.

The letter they don’t open, written and rewritten a dozen times, addressed to a man who will rip it to shreds:

_Andrew,_

_I’m leaving and I’m not coming back._

_Nobody took me. I’m choosing this on my own. It isn’t because you stood me up again, or because you let me spend a month alone in a hospital, or because of the other girls. It isn’t because you don’t have the courage to say to my face that you don’t want me anymore. I’m leaving because you were wrong._

_You were wrong when you told me there were no innocents. I saw them two days ago in Apollo Square. It’s all I can think about since then: there were children behind that wire. I tried so hard to find an excuse for you. I wanted to believe you didn’t know. I want to believe it more than anything, but I know how you keep an eye on everything that happens in Rapture. You wouldn’t miss something like that. You knew all along._

_You told me it was Atlas who was tearing Rapture apart, but you could have stopped this years ago. You could have given them a fair chance like you promised. I saw a banner above the metro station that said “opportunity awaits,” but the only opportunity these people got was an opportunity to starve in a leaking slum. I still remember what D.C. was like. This was a hundred times worse._

_And when letting them starve wasn’t enough, you started tearing families apart! You promised me Rapture would be somewhere the government didn’t take people’s children away from them. You lied to me. I met a woman whose daughter got taken by one of your men. When she tried to follow them, he shot her. She can’t walk anymore, but she’s still alive because her neighbors take care of her. They’re good and kind people. They might be the only ones Rapture has left._

_They opened my eyes. For fifteen years, I’ve made excuses for you. I’m finally through with it. I know better than anybody what you really are, and I know which side I’m going to fight for._

_You won’t win this war. You can’t break them._

_-Diane_

* * *

There’s no mirror in the cold, cramped room Diane finds to sleep in. That might be only mercy Apollo Square has to offer. Mirrors show her a face she doesn’t recognize any more than she recognizes the city.

(Prettier than any girl she’d ever seen, he told her. But she can’t blame the only one who cared.)

She was was seven years old when her mama snatched a curling iron from her small fist, slapped her across the face, and yelled loud enough to wake everyone in their building, _Diane Lynette McClinctock! What if you burned yourself? What if it left a scar?_ Now, with all her makeup sitting in a vanity in Olympus Heights, she can’t even try to hide the marks that cover her face like cracks in shattered glass. (Like glass trampled under frantic feet, set running by a blast and gunfire and cries of a revolution.)

_You’re a canvas_ , her mother used to say. And now she isn’t.

Her nails are in even worse shape, chipped and broken from work they haven’t done in almost two decades. Nail polish is a luxury unheard of in Apollo Square. Before the week is out, she’ll have plain nails for the first time since she was thirteen. Nails to match the callouses forming on her fingers and palms.

News that she is — was, she corrects them, **was** — Andrew Ryan’s mistress spreads quickly. But it doesn’t stop them from taking her in and putting her to work. There’s always work, they say. Too much work and too few hands for them to turn her away.

(She isn’t blind to the looks some people give her, or the to whispered conversations about _Ryan’s whore_ that stop as soon as she enters a room. But she keeps her head down and knows that someday she’ll prove herself to them.)

They don’t yet trust her with the big jobs, the dangerous jobs, but the small ones are just as important. Cleaning, washing, cooking, repairing. Every day, she stitches torn-up clothes back together, just like her mama taught her. And when there’s none of that left to do, they teach her how to stitch torn-up people back together. Diane learns not to flinch at the sight of a bone-deep cut, learns how to steel her hands against curses and groans of pain as she takes the needle in-out, in-out.

By the end of each day, there’s blood under her fingernails, showing through cracks in blue polish. It stains the clothes that hang off her slowly shrinking frame until they’re little better than what she sees people wearing around her.

The days are long, a different kind of long from the ones she spent alone in a sterile hospital room. Sleep takes her the moment she touches her rock-solid mattress. If she ever worked up the nerve to look at herself in a puddle or the bottom of a pot, she knows she’d see bags under her eyes. Exhaustion has something to be said for it: it lets her sleep without a bottle of whiskey, and it fends off the nightmares.

(Apollo Square gives her new nightmares to replace ones of being trampled underfoot in the chaos at the Kashmir. She dreams of women burning, of being dead-but-not and forgotten in the street, of a noose tight around her own neck.)

"You’re gonna look like one of us soon," says one of the five women Diane shares a room with. Audrey Valette, who carries the scent of gunpowder with her, who lost her daughter to Ryan and her son to sickness. Before, that comment would have cut Diane deeper than a knife. Now, in the moments before she passes out from a day’s work, it puts a small smile on her lips.

The curve of her mouth tugs on the scar that cuts her lower lip in two. Even without mirrors, she can never forget.

There’s no question about it: if her mama was here to see what she looks like now, Diane would feel the back of her hand. But Gracie McClintock is at rest in the ground back in Baltimore, and Diane doesn’t need a pretty face to stand by these people's sides.

* * *

Everywhere she goes in Apollo Square, she finds pictures of missing people. Photographs cover every wall, every newsstand, every surface where someone walking by might see. They ask her _have you seen me, have you seen me?_ Diane memorizes each new face, praying that soon her answer will be yes.

She’s been behind the wire a month and a half, and she hasn’t seen a single one. But she keeps reading the names. Keeps hoping.

Today, on one of the walls just outside Artemis Suites, there’s something other than pictures. A flash of purple catches Diane’s blurry eyes — proof of hours spent with a needle between her fingers — and she stops, blinks to clear her eyes. She steps closer and blinks again in disbelief.

Bouquets of violets, tied together with pieces of wire, are pinned to the wall over the pictures.

There isn’t any way to grow them down here, she knows—the last flowers she saw were the rhododendrons she left wilting on her bedside table, half a mile and a world away. Whoever put them up must have smuggled them in. Must have risked being shot by the guards, or frozen, or set on fire, just to bring some sign of life into the Square.

Someone else stops to stare, a man she dimly recognizes from the kitchen. His eyes don’t light up like hers did. He reaches out to brush his fingers against one of the violets’ petals. In the flickering light, his hand trembles. Diane might as well not exist for him; he doesn’t spare her a glance.

She can’t imagine why he isn’t happy. The flowers are proof that beauty can exist in Apollo Square. That no matter how bad things get, the people won’t be broken. She opens her mouth to ask him _aren’t they beautiful_ —

And before she can get the first syllable out, he’s whispering a prayer. The foreign words are almost buried under the sounds of the Square, arguments and fire and distant gunshots, but she knows the tone. It’s how Father Kelso sounded on the day Diane wore a black dress and two bodies weren’t there to bury.

A chill of understanding runs down her spine; her question sticks in her throat like shards of glass.

Santiago Alvarez, age thirty-two; Rebecca Wilkes, age six; Donna Marsh, age fifty-seven... more people than Diane can count. This wall of photographs, crowded and layered on top of each other-- this makeshift memorial is the closest thing they’ll get to a grave. The injustice of it makes Diane’s hands clench into fists at her sides. How can the people she sees every day keep moving forward? How can they not lose themselves to this?

And through all of it, someone risked their life to get flowers. Risked becoming one of the dead in order to honor them. The courage it took-- she can’t begin to imagine.

Ryan painted a picture in her mind of Atlas’ followers being parasites, animals who could only eat away at Rapture until they devoured the city’s heart, no-longer-humans who lost themselves to ADAM and spite. But proof of their humanity is staring her right in the face, violet and green and beautiful. If only she could make Ryan see--

But she isn’t that naive anymore.

* * *

The revolution is headquartered on the top floor of Fontaine’s old poorhouse, a place that’s seen more than its fair share of misery. Some people still speak of Fontaine as a saint— _he gave my family somethin’ to eat when we was starving, he gave us a warm place to sleep when my Becky got that cough_. All of Ryan’s accusations are slander, they say, even though half of them own Bibles, Qurans, Tanakhs he smuggled down into Rapture. But the bulk of their praise is for the man Diane is finally getting to meet.

The room is less grand than she might have expected. A desk, a table, a printing press, and a locked storeroom with never-quite-enough guns and ammunition. Unused posters litter the floor; a dozen pairs of eyes looking towards a better future, a dozen heads raised in defiance. The answer to the question they ask is right in front of her— a man, not a titan, but Diane feels smaller than an ant as she sits across from him.

Someone’s been using a picture of Ryan’s face as a dartboard, and Diane can’t be sure it isn’t the man looking right at her.

“Johnny tells me you’ve been a help t’ us,” he says, an Irish brogue that has working class dripping from every syllable. No one agrees on what he did before becoming Atlas, whether he worked the docks or construction or something else entirely, but they all agree on one thing. He tried doing things Ryan’s way. He tried working for an honest living, and all he got in return was the boot of poverty pressing down on his neck. “Fixed up Sam Boyle right well, you did.”

“Thank you.” She isn’t certain what she should call him; adds, “Sir,” just in case.

“No need for that.” He looks at her appraisingly. “Never thought I’d see a lass give up Olympus Heights for this damned hellhole. Ryan’s own, no less.”

“I’m not Ryan’s no more.” With Ryan she tended her words like a garden, pruning away the double negatives, the _all them_ s, every other little thing he voiced his disapproval of. In Apollo Square, she doesn’t have to. “What he’s doing to ‘Pollo Square— it isn’t right. These people shouldn’t have to live like this. No one should. It’s not…”

“It ain’t the pretty song he told you Rapture was?”

Diane hesitates.

She remembers an arm around her as Rapture first dazzled her through a bathysphere window. She remembers standing next to podiums as words built of iron-clad conviction echoed through the city’s hallways. She remembers lying on a large bed in a dark room, whispering reassurances that it would all be all right, that they would rebuild, that Rapture would stay strong as long as its founder did.

She remembers being a fool.

“I had no idea how bad things were down here. When I saw it myself, I… I couldn’t just do nothing about it.” She leans forward in her chair, sincere and purposeful. “I want to fight for these people. That’s what you’re planning, isn’t it? Leading them in some kind of uprising. Liberating them from this… this place.”

He sighs. For a moment he looks like his namesake, a world-sized burden on his shoulders. For the people of Apollo Square not to give up, someone has to bear their grief, and their anger, and their hopes. Diane can see that weight in the set of Atlas' shoulders, can hear it in his voice.

“I am not a liberator,” he says. “Liberators do not exist. These people will liberate themselves.” And just like that, the axis of Diane’s world shifts.

The heaviness passes as quickly as it came. He moves on to logistics, to plans and her part in them. A man comes in halfway through with a paper in his hand and a scowl on his face; Atlas waves him away. The cornerstone of the revolution, and still he makes time for her. (If that thought stirs something bitter in her, she lets it lie.)

“I don’t want you fightin' _for_ us, Miss McClintock,” he says as she stands, and the bottom drops out from her world. “Fight with us.” He stays sitting, watching her reaction, appraisal replaced with expectation and something she can’t recognize.

(She hasn’t yet learned what the triumph of stealing a trophy, of plucking a rose from its garden, of reeling in a baited line, looks like.)

“I will.”

* * *

Every round of ammunition is precious in Apollo Square. Not nearly as precious as ADAM, but precious enough that people have died getting it from outside the wire. Guns are easy— it’s the bullets that matter.

Some use them as currency. A dozen rounds for a drop of ADAM, for a scrap of ever-scarcer food. (She catches herself longing for the old days of dinners at Rapture’s finest restaurants, and shame coils in her stomach to match the gnawing hunger.) Fights break out over rations more and more, but Atlas is there with a sharp word and a strong hand. And, when need be, a gun of his own.

For a girl from a family full of soldiers, Diane doesn’t take quickly to learning to shoot. A needle is second nature; her mama put one her hand from the time she was a little girl. But she was never allowed near the locked box in the closet with her father’s rifle inside. What would a future housewife ever need with a gun?

More than her mama could have expected, as it turns out.

A hand covers hers, correcting her grip, shifting her fingers into place. Hold the pistol with two hands, right high on the grip, left lower. _Not so tightly, Miss McClintock. Don’t lock your arms. Steady now. Fire._

A closer miss, but still a miss.

She knows what her brother would say, if he were by her side and not in a battlefield graveyard: _Keep your head up, Dee_. He'd look down at her from his towering height, tap the bottom of her chin like he did when they were children. _Keep your head up_. Diane takes a breath, steadies her aching arms, and tries again.

A hit, and a hit, and a hit.

Her first raid goes smoother than she could have expected. The security at the wire is less-- both sides are wearing thin, these days. No Little Sisters or Big Daddies, but they get buckshot and grenades and a crossbow with bolts. Best of all, they take down two of Ryan’s men in exchange for none of their own. Atlas smiles when they come back— thin, worn around the edges, but a smile all the same.

The next is less successful.

Diane looks back once and keeps running. Two dead people are no more use than one.

(She remembers two letters arriving within weeks of each other-- her mother’s screams when she opened the first, and the numbed graveyard-silence when she opened the second.)

* * *

This is what happens when a raiding party takes down a Big Daddy: someone slings the Little Sister over their shoulder like a ragdoll as she cries and sobs and screams for Mr. Bubbles to wake up, wake up, please, wake up. The little girl pounds her fists against the chest of her captor, kicks her bare feet against their back with all her might. None of it stops her from being dragged back to the fence. Sometimes her hair catches on the barbed wire, sometimes it doesn’t.

(Diane always wanted to be a mother. Now she’s glad she never was.)

Someone with a stronger stomach than Diane gets the ADAM only way they can. A door shuts, a minute passes, the crying stops. They’re left with enough ADAM to get through the next few weeks and a broken little body with a hole where her stomach should be.

Everyone cheers when a Little Sister is captured, but when the fire starts, Hestia Chambers is as quiet as an empty church.

“She didn’t remember me.”

Audrey Valette is staring into the fire, at the burning shape that used to be her daughter. She’s been that way for an hour, talking in halts and jerks over the crackle of the flames. The Little Sisters aren’t children anymore, Atlas always says. They’re Ryan’s monsters. If they’re anything more than that, then—

Then there’s nothing left but to wait for Rapture to fall into the sea.

But Diane can’t let herself doubt like that. Not while Valette is looking into the flames like the fire is the only thing in the world. These are her people now— hers to fight beside, hers to comfort. Her hand stays, anchoring, on Valette’s shoulder. Valette covers Diane’s hand with her own, squeezes it like it’s the neck of the man who took Bonnie away from her. The fire doesn’t warm Diane; she feels cold all the way through.

She’s tried telling Valette that she doesn’t have to watch the fire, doesn’t have to do this to herself, but she won't listen.

“I called her name,” Valette continues in a whisper. “She didn’t answer. She looked right through me. And her eyes… What did they turn her into?”

It isn’t a question Diane is meant to answer, so she doesn’t. They both know the answer. Valette falls silent for a moment, breathing quietly, trying not to breath in the smoke.

“They took her so quick, I didn’t have time to blink. I was getting that day’s Tribune-- December 10th. Talking about that big tennis match... Thought she was just bein’ quiet, but when I turned around, she...” Her hand slips off Diane’s and falls to her side. “Why didn’t I go after them?” Valette’s voice catches, the first sign of anything but emptiness since the fire was lit.

Diane remembers Elise Tobet walking into the fire weeks ago, not saying a word, not screaming until the very end. She holds on tighter. “There was nothing you could do. It wasn’t your—”

“Don’t tell me that!” She wrenches Diane’s hand off of her shoulder, finally turning to look at her. Her pupils are blown wide, irises made gold from light cast by the flames. “I was her mother. Had to be something I could do to stop them.”

“There wasn’t. Valette, there w--”

“I took my eyes off her!” She drops her gaze to the ground. Quietly, so close to defeat that it’s frightening: “I let them take her.“

She sinks to her knees, curling in on herself, one side of her face illuminated by the fire. “I let them take my baby girl.” Her shoulders shake as she breaks apart, apologies pouring through the cracks and from her lips. Choked sobs of _I’m sorry baby, I never should’ve took my eye off you, I should’ve kept you safe, I’m sorry, it should’ve been me, I’m so sorry..._

Diane kneels on the cold ground and puts her arms around Valette. She murmurs _it's not your fault, wasn’t nothing you could do, look at me, you did everything you could, you were a good mother_ ; lets Valette cry into her hair until she stops trembling.

The tears turn into stories— about a Bonnie who liked puzzles, about a Bonnie who thought a tree was a monster the first time she saw one, about a Bonnie who snuck into Arcadia once and scared her mother half to death. About a Bonnie who was killed long before today’s raid. Diane listens until the fire dies and the words die with it.

They both rise on shaky legs. Back to their duties, back to the revolution, back to a war they never asked for.

They didn’t start this, but by God, they’ll end it.


End file.
